Pretty much everything you described is OUTSIDE the engine.
But, Internal combustion engines of the size usefull for motorized transport are about as efficient as they are going to get at extracting energy from gasoline.
How you use that energy will imporve, providing an effective increase in efficiency (hybrid tech and the like) but you will still only be extracting about 20-25% of the total energy in Gas for real work. You might be able to get up to 30% using a Volt style power train where the engine is always run under optimal conditions and is used to generate electrictly only. The only other thing in your post that would effect energy efficiency in ICE is that tighter controls would increase fuel efficiency...by 1 or 2 MPG.
Since cars typically drive 150-250 thousand miles and a 30 mpg car releases 0.2 pounds of CO2 per mile, a standard car would release 50,000 pounds of CO2. A tesla may release 0.
Since the manufacturing techniques are going to be the same (or very near) it almost doesn't matter how much CO2 you emit. Youa re still saving 25 tons of CO2
Nah...just because you have a patent issued doesn't mean it is possible to produce the item effectively OR that people even want to buy it.
However by making the design public it might help you create something even better.
Remember, under patent law, you can patent an improvement upon a device. Therefore if Big Oil owns a patent on a 500 MPG engine, you should improve the design, make a 501 mpg engine and NOT sell out to the oil companies.
Find 5 patents that would have led to ultra efficient cars and aren't being used.
If "Big Oil" has been buying up patents for 50 years than we have at least 30 years of inventions no longer under patent protection...where are those inventions?
The reality is that while Oil companies probably have tried to squash some tech, the basic laws of thermodynamics suggest that internal combustion engines are about as efficient as they are going to get.
Battery tech is also progressing very quickly (Microsoft, IBM etc are pushing for better batteries and can compete with oil companies) however most of the really efficient and high power batteries are due to nano-type materials, ultra pure processing and extremely fine manufacturing controls. Until very recently these techniques were impossible to test and those that were testable were prohibitively expensive to produce.
If you want to claim a conspiracy, you must offer some proof.
As I have said in many posts on this thread, literally EVERYTHING will kill you.
There is no such thing as perfectly safe. However there is damage within the repair capabilities of the body. So long as you don't exceed those limits radiation is as safe as anything else.
Which is fundamentally based on experimentation and observation.
If you only test 100 people you aren't going to see something that effects 1:1000. If you only test 1000 you won't see something that only shows in 1:10000 etc.
You can make guesses (called hypothesis) but until you test it on enough people you will never know for sure.
Radiation is extremely safe, except when it's deadly. When it's deadly, then it's not extremely safe.
... just like everything else in life.
(to quote Fight CLub) The survival rate of everyone drops to zero on a long enough time frame.
Safety is a relative term. Arsenic is safe....in fact you requier a certain amount of arsenic to live. If you get more than nanograms arsenic becomes bad...
I work for a Pharmaceutical monitoring the safety, efficacy, manufacturing and advertisement of drugs and medical devices. I am keeping my eyes open for these types of products because it directly affects my job.
I agree...however it is a technical impossibility to understand the issues BEFORE widespread use.
The reason is that most issues don't show up in everyone. Therefore the only way to understand the dangers is to deploy it widely. This isn't a problem so long as you do it smart and are cautious.
Actually, Asbestos is a very safe material...it is only when it is powdered or otherwise disintegrated that it becomes dangerous. Asbestos is still used in most buildings. It is still common in household good...it is justcarefully controlled during application and removal.
The reason medical science took so long to catch up is because modern medical science was Invented After asbestos was first used. It wasn't till the 40's and 50's that medicine began to realize that disease can be caused by something other than bacteria.
Now we know better what to look for...while it is important to pay attention, we are much better off to spot a problem before it becomes an issue.
I agree. Fear is useless. Caution is good. What level of caution is applied is the question.
I'd say the same level as current products but include a test for lost particles. This is already done for most products so it really isn't a huge deal.
If nano passes then same testing that drugs do, so you can prove that fewer than 1 in 100,000 people will have a sever problem, than I say go for it!
:) I actually work for a drug company managing the regulations. Yes, most if not all drugs have more side effects than therapeutic effects. Any time you poke a complex system like your body you will probably mess up more things than you fix.
The real question is...Are you happier and healthier despite the side effects? If the answer is yes than great, if the answer is no than...STOP TAKING IT.
You will NEVER get a drug that just fixes you and doesn't hurt you somewhere. The same is true of drinking, eating and breathing. Drinking water makes you need to pee (a side effect), eating gives you gas and can make you fat...and believe it or not you actually breath the most dangerous poison known to man...oxygen.
Always remember the awful truth...you, ddgconsultant, you will die some day. Everything kills you to some extant. The only question is quality of life in the mean time.
From your examples you prove my point. It is the excess that will kill you.
Remember, litterly everything kills you. Specific nano tech WILL be extremly toxic. Other nano tech will be less toxic than drinking clean water or eating organic food. However there will not be a general health or environmental threat from nano particles as a class of technology.
As the ONLY group that has money, of course the consumers will pay for it. But will we pay for it up front? Will we pay for it through taxes? Will we pay for it through higher prices?
Hey!!! Thats what Data needs to do...feed the anti-bottomonium particles through the quantum phase inverter than boost the power using a coherent tetryon beam!
I am sensing a line from the next Star Trek movie...
The respiratory system is probably the most sensitive place. Personally I think that may be the only common health hazard (carbon nanotubes that act like asbestos). There is no direct evidence of this yet but it wouldn't surprise me.
But even the tiniest nano-particle is still going to be hundreds of atoms large simply to get the complexity necessary for something interesting to happen. The body routinely manipulates structures from 10 atoms up to hundreds of thousands of atoms (nucleotide base pairs up through macro scale objects like muscle fibers).
The biggest concern is not the size of the particles but rather some unique chemical bond that they may poses which is difficult to process. However the body already has a system to deal with unknown bonds. It takes the nano object and throws it in a bath of hydrogen peroxide. The random oxidation reduces the complex structure into it's most basic constituent parts (oxidized of course) and the body can then recycle or dispose of it. The body can deal with every single type of atom (admittedly some are easier than others). But we will also need to watch out for toxicity from the constituent atoms on a straight FDA RDA limit.
#1 Not true! The actual environment that our cells operate on IS nano. Every crucial function in the body demands exceptionally tight control of structures much SMALLER than most nano-sized particles are likley to be
#2 Completly true...which is a good thing. We are essentially bags of salty water with a lot of gunk like lipids and proteins lying around and a huge amount of free energy in constant use. We are potentially the most hostile environment a nano-particle is likley to encounter. The huge surface area means it is much more likley to get gummed up and inactivated almost immediatly causing no more harm than any other chemical you ingest.
These are not hypothesis, they are facts. I am not suggesting there will be no harm but I am suggesting that there is no reason to think that nano-particles as a class will be more toxic than other classes of chmicals.
They are taking material that grew from sunlight (or eating things that grew from sunlight) and turning it into an oil. So long as the total amount of energy in the oil is LESS than the total amount of energy in the raw materials you don't NEED an external fuel source.
If you need high heat yu could always use some of the last batch to fire the furnace for the next batch...
Radiation is extremly safe and it does cure many disease that have no alternative treatment. We are bathed in radiation at every second of every day with no ill effects but just like oxygen and water, in excess it will kill you very quickly. Just because it COULD kill you doesn't mean it is dangerous.
If you RTFA you will find that they say nano could enter cells, could cause cancer, could disrupt cellular processes OR it could be perfectly harmless (as harmless as dirt) BUT there isn't enough information to tell.
Personally I think the largest concern with nano is carbon nanotubes because they have the potential to cause the same problems as asbestos. But what is important is to do your due diligence and TEST anthing you want to sell.
There is no reason to fear nano, only to be a little cautious.
#1 I was responding to your comment regarding my original post. I will be happy to expand it to all my posts. Barring stupid typo's like the one you mentioned, is there anything that is technically incorrect with extremly minor exceptions?
#2 Point taken...under exceptionally rare conditions it is possible to randomly amplify everything. However this tends to give you low yields of very short sequences and it is essentially imposible to reconstruct the original genome. Using PCR it would be better to include one very short primer and do an extremly long elongation phase. You wouldn't have the geometric growth but you would have a starting point for sequencing. If you were trying to sequence a hard to grow bug you would probably be better off to try to directly incorporate it into a plasmid for cloning. Even with a low success rate you would probably get something and that would let you start. Out of professional curiosity, what bug were you working with that grew so slowly you had to use a shotgun approach? I can't really imagine how you would get usefull information from the protocol you eluded to so if there is something more I would love to read upon it.
#3 Sorry, this is what I get for not proofreading!:-) I was intending to state that often times the marker is incorporated into the primer. This makes for a cleaner gel and a more accurate read.
#4 There are a wide variety of things to look at. Tandom repeats are the easiest but provide the least resolution. They are most often the first test just because it is easy to exclude people however they can't be used to conclusivly PROVE that you have the correct person. To conclusivly prove it you must look at something much more specific like point mutations that happen to disrupt a restriction site. These are extremly specific but take longer to run and cost more since you must use a large set of starting DNA and you have multiple reactions. Tandom repeats throw up a lot of false positives since often times the repeat is a short sequence and it can occur randomly elsewhere in the genome.
#5 Obviously the ACS didn't ask me just like they didn't ask you. However this does make me question the legitamecy of their other published articles. The purpose of peer review is to provide legitamecy to a paper. This article demonstrates a flaw in the peer review system at ACS. If the ACS wants to degrad their publication that is their choice, but I don't have to approve and I don't have to keep my opinion quiet. And yes this is my opinion backed up with examples where appropriate.
Yes, I know I have taken an unpopular stance. On slashdot most people are very uncritical on any article. I look at this and I see that these scientists managed to get an article published even though it doesn't fit the usual criteria for peer review publication. Since I am taking a stand that is contray to most, I am not surprised that many people disagree with me. You can imagine how much this upsets me.
The reason I say this does not deserve publication is because it is not novel, it has not expanded the bounds of science, and it isn't even a negative proof.
This article says they created non-natural nucleotides then created a DNA molecule from these nucleotides.
This is why I cited AZT. As someone who did AIDS research (specifically looking at the pulmonary effects of these drugs) I am very familiar with the structure and function of AZT and it came to mind. AZT is a derivative nucleotide that mimics adenine but cannot replicate correctly. RNA reverse transcriptase is especially suceptible to this type of error. AZT is an example of a synthetic, non-natural nucleotide that has been used in DNA molecules for about 20 years.
I am not hand waving and bragging. If you actually looked at my posts you will notice that in multiple responses I have clearly stated that this is a neat technique and one that will be usefull but not up to peer review publication. In my most recent post I used a well know example to support my contention that this article is NOT news-worthy.
If you want a protocol you can google it yourself. Most colleges with junior or senior level molecular biology classes will have a lab that does exaclty what I am talking about.
I find it very amusing that you completly ignored my statments and instead decided to rant about AIDS research. This suggests that you have no knowledge of the area and are instead just trying to be a troll.
I also noticed how you posted anonymously...for your lesson I will simply state that it is very hard to take anything from an AC who doesn't support a single statment he makes with anything but a long winded rant. Thus ends your lesson in civility.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, if you have a patent issued on an improvment, you are free to build your device as described in the patent without being subject to royalties.
This is why patents are phrased as broadly as possible.
Pretty much everything you described is OUTSIDE the engine.
But, Internal combustion engines of the size usefull for motorized transport are about as efficient as they are going to get at extracting energy from gasoline.
How you use that energy will imporve, providing an effective increase in efficiency (hybrid tech and the like) but you will still only be extracting about 20-25% of the total energy in Gas for real work. You might be able to get up to 30% using a Volt style power train where the engine is always run under optimal conditions and is used to generate electrictly only. The only other thing in your post that would effect energy efficiency in ICE is that tighter controls would increase fuel efficiency...by 1 or 2 MPG.
This is actually dictated by Carnot's law.
Since cars typically drive 150-250 thousand miles and a 30 mpg car releases 0.2 pounds of CO2 per mile, a standard car would release 50,000 pounds of CO2. A tesla may release 0.
Since the manufacturing techniques are going to be the same (or very near) it almost doesn't matter how much CO2 you emit. Youa re still saving 25 tons of CO2
Sorry about that everyone...The HVAC is broken at my office in Georgia in July.
I am still figuring out how Big Oil and the CIA did it so I was distracted from the general consiracies...please accept my apologies!
Nah...just because you have a patent issued doesn't mean it is possible to produce the item effectively OR that people even want to buy it.
However by making the design public it might help you create something even better.
Remember, under patent law, you can patent an improvement upon a device. Therefore if Big Oil owns a patent on a 500 MPG engine, you should improve the design, make a 501 mpg engine and NOT sell out to the oil companies.
Patents are public informsation...
Find 5 patents that would have led to ultra efficient cars and aren't being used.
If "Big Oil" has been buying up patents for 50 years than we have at least 30 years of inventions no longer under patent protection...where are those inventions?
The reality is that while Oil companies probably have tried to squash some tech, the basic laws of thermodynamics suggest that internal combustion engines are about as efficient as they are going to get.
Battery tech is also progressing very quickly (Microsoft, IBM etc are pushing for better batteries and can compete with oil companies) however most of the really efficient and high power batteries are due to nano-type materials, ultra pure processing and extremely fine manufacturing controls. Until very recently these techniques were impossible to test and those that were testable were prohibitively expensive to produce.
If you want to claim a conspiracy, you must offer some proof.
As I have said in many posts on this thread, literally EVERYTHING will kill you.
There is no such thing as perfectly safe. However there is damage within the repair capabilities of the body. So long as you don't exceed those limits radiation is as safe as anything else.
Untrue....UV ionizing radiation is used to create vitamin D.
Some level of ionizing radiation is absolutely essential for life. A truly radiation free environment will kill you.
Which is fundamentally based on experimentation and observation.
If you only test 100 people you aren't going to see something that effects 1:1000. If you only test 1000 you won't see something that only shows in 1:10000 etc.
You can make guesses (called hypothesis) but until you test it on enough people you will never know for sure.
you cut off my argument:
Radiation is extremely safe, except when it's deadly. When it's deadly, then it's not extremely safe.
... just like everything else in life.
(to quote Fight CLub) The survival rate of everyone drops to zero on a long enough time frame.
Safety is a relative term. Arsenic is safe....in fact you requier a certain amount of arsenic to live. If you get more than nanograms arsenic becomes bad...
Actually, I am looking.
I work for a Pharmaceutical monitoring the safety, efficacy, manufacturing and advertisement of drugs and medical devices. I am keeping my eyes open for these types of products because it directly affects my job.
Regardless this is an exciting time. I can't wait to see how this all turns out!
I agree...however it is a technical impossibility to understand the issues BEFORE widespread use.
The reason is that most issues don't show up in everyone. Therefore the only way to understand the dangers is to deploy it widely. This isn't a problem so long as you do it smart and are cautious.
Actually, Asbestos is a very safe material...it is only when it is powdered or otherwise disintegrated that it becomes dangerous. Asbestos is still used in most buildings. It is still common in household good...it is justcarefully controlled during application and removal.
The reason medical science took so long to catch up is because modern medical science was Invented After asbestos was first used. It wasn't till the 40's and 50's that medicine began to realize that disease can be caused by something other than bacteria.
Now we know better what to look for...while it is important to pay attention, we are much better off to spot a problem before it becomes an issue.
I agree. Fear is useless. Caution is good. What level of caution is applied is the question.
I'd say the same level as current products but include a test for lost particles. This is already done for most products so it really isn't a huge deal.
If nano passes then same testing that drugs do, so you can prove that fewer than 1 in 100,000 people will have a sever problem, than I say go for it!
:) I actually work for a drug company managing the regulations. Yes, most if not all drugs have more side effects than therapeutic effects. Any time you poke a complex system like your body you will probably mess up more things than you fix.
The real question is...Are you happier and healthier despite the side effects? If the answer is yes than great, if the answer is no than ...STOP TAKING IT.
You will NEVER get a drug that just fixes you and doesn't hurt you somewhere. The same is true of drinking, eating and breathing. Drinking water makes you need to pee (a side effect), eating gives you gas and can make you fat...and believe it or not you actually breath the most dangerous poison known to man...oxygen.
Always remember the awful truth...you, ddgconsultant, you will die some day. Everything kills you to some extant. The only question is quality of life in the mean time.
From your examples you prove my point. It is the excess that will kill you.
Remember, litterly everything kills you. Specific nano tech WILL be extremly toxic. Other nano tech will be less toxic than drinking clean water or eating organic food. However there will not be a general health or environmental threat from nano particles as a class of technology.
As the ONLY group that has money, of course the consumers will pay for it. But will we pay for it up front? Will we pay for it through taxes? Will we pay for it through higher prices?
Hey!!! Thats what Data needs to do...feed the anti-bottomonium particles through the quantum phase inverter than boost the power using a coherent tetryon beam!
I am sensing a line from the next Star Trek movie...
The respiratory system is probably the most sensitive place. Personally I think that may be the only common health hazard (carbon nanotubes that act like asbestos). There is no direct evidence of this yet but it wouldn't surprise me.
But even the tiniest nano-particle is still going to be hundreds of atoms large simply to get the complexity necessary for something interesting to happen. The body routinely manipulates structures from 10 atoms up to hundreds of thousands of atoms (nucleotide base pairs up through macro scale objects like muscle fibers).
The biggest concern is not the size of the particles but rather some unique chemical bond that they may poses which is difficult to process. However the body already has a system to deal with unknown bonds. It takes the nano object and throws it in a bath of hydrogen peroxide. The random oxidation reduces the complex structure into it's most basic constituent parts (oxidized of course) and the body can then recycle or dispose of it. The body can deal with every single type of atom (admittedly some are easier than others). But we will also need to watch out for toxicity from the constituent atoms on a straight FDA RDA limit.
#1 Not true! The actual environment that our cells operate on IS nano. Every crucial function in the body demands exceptionally tight control of structures much SMALLER than most nano-sized particles are likley to be
#2 Completly true...which is a good thing. We are essentially bags of salty water with a lot of gunk like lipids and proteins lying around and a huge amount of free energy in constant use. We are potentially the most hostile environment a nano-particle is likley to encounter. The huge surface area means it is much more likley to get gummed up and inactivated almost immediatly causing no more harm than any other chemical you ingest.
These are not hypothesis, they are facts. I am not suggesting there will be no harm but I am suggesting that there is no reason to think that nano-particles as a class will be more toxic than other classes of chmicals.
The energy input is called "the sun"
They are taking material that grew from sunlight (or eating things that grew from sunlight) and turning it into an oil. So long as the total amount of energy in the oil is LESS than the total amount of energy in the raw materials you don't NEED an external fuel source.
If you need high heat yu could always use some of the last batch to fire the furnace for the next batch...
I thought quarks could not exist in anything less than triplets....This sounds like a doublet.
Radiation is extremly safe and it does cure many disease that have no alternative treatment. We are bathed in radiation at every second of every day with no ill effects but just like oxygen and water, in excess it will kill you very quickly. Just because it COULD kill you doesn't mean it is dangerous.
If you RTFA you will find that they say nano could enter cells, could cause cancer, could disrupt cellular processes OR it could be perfectly harmless (as harmless as dirt) BUT there isn't enough information to tell.
Personally I think the largest concern with nano is carbon nanotubes because they have the potential to cause the same problems as asbestos. But what is important is to do your due diligence and TEST anthing you want to sell.
There is no reason to fear nano, only to be a little cautious.
Using radiation
#1 I was responding to your comment regarding my original post. I will be happy to expand it to all my posts. Barring stupid typo's like the one you mentioned, is there anything that is technically incorrect with extremly minor exceptions?
#2 Point taken...under exceptionally rare conditions it is possible to randomly amplify everything. However this tends to give you low yields of very short sequences and it is essentially imposible to reconstruct the original genome. Using PCR it would be better to include one very short primer and do an extremly long elongation phase. You wouldn't have the geometric growth but you would have a starting point for sequencing. If you were trying to sequence a hard to grow bug you would probably be better off to try to directly incorporate it into a plasmid for cloning. Even with a low success rate you would probably get something and that would let you start. Out of professional curiosity, what bug were you working with that grew so slowly you had to use a shotgun approach? I can't really imagine how you would get usefull information from the protocol you eluded to so if there is something more I would love to read upon it.
#3 Sorry, this is what I get for not proofreading! :-) I was intending to state that often times the marker is incorporated into the primer. This makes for a cleaner gel and a more accurate read.
#4 There are a wide variety of things to look at. Tandom repeats are the easiest but provide the least resolution. They are most often the first test just because it is easy to exclude people however they can't be used to conclusivly PROVE that you have the correct person. To conclusivly prove it you must look at something much more specific like point mutations that happen to disrupt a restriction site. These are extremly specific but take longer to run and cost more since you must use a large set of starting DNA and you have multiple reactions. Tandom repeats throw up a lot of false positives since often times the repeat is a short sequence and it can occur randomly elsewhere in the genome.
#5 Obviously the ACS didn't ask me just like they didn't ask you. However this does make me question the legitamecy of their other published articles. The purpose of peer review is to provide legitamecy to a paper. This article demonstrates a flaw in the peer review system at ACS. If the ACS wants to degrad their publication that is their choice, but I don't have to approve and I don't have to keep my opinion quiet. And yes this is my opinion backed up with examples where appropriate.
Very amusing rant.
Yes, I know I have taken an unpopular stance. On slashdot most people are very uncritical on any article. I look at this and I see that these scientists managed to get an article published even though it doesn't fit the usual criteria for peer review publication. Since I am taking a stand that is contray to most, I am not surprised that many people disagree with me. You can imagine how much this upsets me.
The reason I say this does not deserve publication is because it is not novel, it has not expanded the bounds of science, and it isn't even a negative proof.
This article says they created non-natural nucleotides then created a DNA molecule from these nucleotides.
This is why I cited AZT. As someone who did AIDS research (specifically looking at the pulmonary effects of these drugs) I am very familiar with the structure and function of AZT and it came to mind. AZT is a derivative nucleotide that mimics adenine but cannot replicate correctly. RNA reverse transcriptase is especially suceptible to this type of error. AZT is an example of a synthetic, non-natural nucleotide that has been used in DNA molecules for about 20 years.
I am not hand waving and bragging. If you actually looked at my posts you will notice that in multiple responses I have clearly stated that this is a neat technique and one that will be usefull but not up to peer review publication. In my most recent post I used a well know example to support my contention that this article is NOT news-worthy.
If you want a protocol you can google it yourself. Most colleges with junior or senior level molecular biology classes will have a lab that does exaclty what I am talking about.
I find it very amusing that you completly ignored my statments and instead decided to rant about AIDS research. This suggests that you have no knowledge of the area and are instead just trying to be a troll.
I also noticed how you posted anonymously...for your lesson I will simply state that it is very hard to take anything from an AC who doesn't support a single statment he makes with anything but a long winded rant.
Thus ends your lesson in civility.